Exposition: the working of the actual past + the
virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history,
such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually
occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish +
the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual
sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay,
fiction – in short, belief – grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle,
ever-dimming + and ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast,
the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to
circumvent/expose as fraudulent (Mitchell 392).

This bit of exposition is provided by the somewhat minor character of Isaac
Sachs almost a third of the way through David Mitchell’s postmodern exploration
of perception and its influence on reality, the story within a story (within a
story…) Cloud Atlas. Mitchell combines six distinct narratives in an
interlaced storyline, nesting each section within the others, each section
directly referencing the one preceding it while also hinting those that lie
ahead. The novel directly references this nesting technique when composer
Robert Frobisher discusses the planned arrangement of his musical score Cloud
Atlas Sextet in the “Letters from Zedelghem” section: “In the first set,
each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is
recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?” (Mitchell 445). Whether
revolutionary or gimmicky, this presentation of intertwined narratives
demonstrates that human reality is not determined by actuality or factuality,
but rather by the perception of events and how those perceptions are presented
and interpreted. Resisting the ability of the traditional novel to properly
interpret, Cloud Atlas exercises what William Spanos calls “the mockery
of the canonical literary forms of ‘official’ culture” (Spanos 20) to make its
point about the relationship between perception and reality. By taking what
might otherwise be coherent texts and cutting them up and rearranging their
remains as he sees fit, Mitchell makes good use of the postmodern format to
illustrate the fluidity of reality, what Spanos refers to as the “disorienting
mystery, the ominous and threatening uncanniness of being that resists
naming” (Spanos 24). The nested format provides a vehicle to further inject
doubt and allow interpretation as to what is actual reality as opposed to
perceived reality within the novel. This brings into question the relationships
between the sections and the characters in each, along with the events
presented. Cloud Atlas clearly demonstrates the fragility of reality,
which is manipulated both by perception – eyewitnesses – and by time, and the
accuracy of Sachs’ musings are evident throughout the novel.

“Mr. Walker, Ocean Bay’s sole taverner, is also its principal timber merchant &
he brags of his years as a master shipbuilder in Liverpool. (I am now versed
enough in Antipodese etiquette to let such unlikely truths lie)” (Mitchell 4).

Here, Adam Ewing encounters a version of reality which he believes to be untrue,
yet he does nothing to unmask it, but instead merely accepts it. This example
of not questioning a presented version of reality sets the tone for the entire
work. Mitchell then continues this idea during the discussion of the Maori and
Moriori conflict:

The origins of the Moriori of Rekohu [. . .] remain a mystery to this day. Mr.
Evans evinces the belief they are descended from Jews expelled from Spain,
citing their hooked noses & sneering lips. Mr. D’arnoq’s preferred theorem,
that the Moriori were once Maori whose canoes were wrecked upon these remotest
of isles, is founded on similarities of tongue & mythology & thereby possesses a
higher carat of logic (Mitchell 11).

When confronted with these two possible versions of the founding of the Moriori
tribe, Ewing tries to determine the truth, but cannot, aside from the aside that
the second theory has a more logical base. This selective acceptance of
information demonstrates another method of crafting the events of the past to
our liking. The abrupt ending of this section links the otherwise unrelated
sections of the novel together and allow the reader to begin the process of
reading into and interpreting the events and ideas shared between the various
storylines.

In a letter to his friend Rufus Sixsmith, Robert Frobisher mentions
finding half a book titled The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing in his
bedroom at the Chateau Zedelghem that ends precisely where it ended in the text
of Cloud Atlas. Here, even Frobisher begins questioning what is real and
what is not in the letter:

Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity – seems too structured for a
genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true – but who would bother
forging such a journal, and why? (Mitchell 64)

Already we see that even the central figure of this segment is unsure of what is
true and what is not. The apparent inability of Frobisher to distinguish
between truth and fiction is odd considering the many versions of truth he
presents in order to earn his lucrative position as scribe to the great composer
Vyvyan Ayrs. In justifying his own flight from England he considers what forced
his hand: “Sobering to think how one accursed night of baccarat can alter a
man’s social standing so irrevocably” (Mitchell 44). This passage shows that
Frobisher’s point of view has influenced how the gambling incident occurred. He
attempts to alter the past with a rationalization that he is somehow blameless
in his current situation. While being questioned during his interview for the
position with Ayrs, Frobisher acknowledges that he “Answered truthfully, though
I veiled my expulsion from Caius behind an obscure malady” (Mitchell 51). Here
Frobisher makes another deliberate attempt to adjust history in an effort to
affect a more desirable future than the one in which he finds himself. As the
section moves along, Mitchell presents another bread crumb of continuity between
segments that will carry through the remainder of the novel: the now famous
birthmark. While writing of his affair with Ayrs’ wife, Frobisher notes “She
plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said
resembles a comet” (Mitchell 85). This birthmark will provide ample
opportunities for the reader to link the various storylines together, but as I
will demonstrate, this link is tenuous at best.

As Luisa Rey, the central character in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey
Mystery,” reads the letters between Rufus Sixsmith and Robert Frobisher, she
makes the following discovery:

It is not the unflattering light they shed on a pliable young Rufus Sixsmith
that bothers Luisa but the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people
that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them
memories. The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these
“memories” as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent
death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher
mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.

I just don’t believe this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t
(Mitchell 120).

The reader understands that Luisa Rey has a birthmark like Frobisher’s, but she
refuses to believe in anything that might be inferred from such a coincidence.
Though Luisa Rey herself acknowledges the piece of information “will not be
dismissed,” she refuses to believe it. This ability to accept or ignore pieces
of information as they relate to individuals is a uniquely human trait, one on
which shows up throughout Cloud Atlas. In actuality, Cloud Atlas
does not explicitly state that Louisa Rey shares this birthmark, but we simply
assume this to be true. Separate from this consideration, we also see Luisa
deny any perceived connection with Frobisher and Zedelghem, even though she
established the link on her own. She denies the connection she alone created,
which is perhaps the worst possible act of personal perception overwhelming
reality. While trapped in an elevator with Luisa, Sixsmith asks about how her
father, once a police officer, became a celebrated journalist. Luisa’s inner
monologue is very revealing when she thinks “You asked for it. The
story is polished with each retelling” (Mitchell 92). By “polishing” the tale,
rough edges removed and weaknesses reduced by the perception of the person
presenting history, and thus the presenter reduces the actual history, morphing
it into something else: an idealized version of events designed not by fact,
but by desire. This is another instance of how reality alters through the
continued retelling of it, What Jean-Paul Satre asserts in his novel Nausea,
when the character of Roquentin states that “everything changes when you tell
about life; it’s a change on one notices…things happen one way and we tell about
them in the opposite sense” (Sartre 39-40). Later, as Luisa makes her first
investigative visit to the Swanekke reactor site, she encounters Isaac Sachs, an
engineer who worked with Rufus Sixsmith. Here again Luisa makes a decision to
alter her reality, and thus Sach’s:

“You must be Megan.”

Why be contradictory? “And you are?”

“Isaac Sachs. Engineer.”

[. . . After being identified as Luisa Rey by Fay Li]

“You’re not Sixsmith’s niece?”

“Excuse me, but I never said I was” (Mitchell
105-106).

By not correcting Sachs’ incorrect belief of her identity, Luisa alters reality,
this time to her professional advantage as opposed to simply playing to family
pride as in the previous instance.

As her story progresses, Luisa visits with protest leader Hester Van Zandt and
learns a powerful lesson about perception and reality as it applies to her
investigation:

The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees,
dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can
extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying
‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up (Mitchell 124).

The idea that an individual’s perception can be made to change by forces outside
of themselves, regardless of how much time elapses between the event and the
individual perceiving it, is both a powerful and disturbing one. The idea is
very explicit here: what we see, or hear, or read, is always what we get, but
may not be what actually was. When our interpretation of the world is dependent
on information not directly ours, we must accept that the resulting perception
of reality is not accurate.

In another opportunity to link the novel’s sections with one
another, we see Luisa place an order at a rare music store for a copy of Robert
Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet (Mitchell 119). She learned of Frobisher
the composer through Sixsmith’s letters after his death, but Cloud Atlas
presents another twist here: as Luisa does not receive the “second” batch of
letters until well after she orders the Sextet, there is no way in which
she could have known the name of the work. Frobisher did not give it a name
until near the end of the sequence of letters to Sixsmith (Mitchell 460). The
fact that Frobisher does not name his work until the second set of letters, but
Luisa seems to know its title anyway is another means to force a reevaluation of
the perception of these events. Additionally, we receive yet another unexpected
twist of perception when Luisa and Joe Napier venture to Sixsmith’s yacht. As
they pass by a sign reading: “CAPE YERBAS MARINA ROYALE / PROUD HOME OF THE
PROPHETESS / BEST-PRESERVED SCHOONER IN THE WORLD!”, Luisa:

[ . . . ] is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment
and look at its riggings, listen to its wooden bones creaking.

“What’s wrong?” whispers Napier.

What is wrong? Luisa’s birthmark throbs. She
grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and
the future (Mitchell 430).

The reference to the Adam Ewing segment of the novel through the
Prophetess links us to a reality not directly related to the current one,
and thus forces us to look again at how we perceive events. With the additional
inference of the birthmark, which Adam Ewing does not have, Mitchell leads us
further into the consideration of actual and perceived events. The use of the
phrase “elastic moment” reinforces the idea of the fluidity of time and
perception, and the idea that the “ends” disappear “into the past and the
future” is another method of shifting our perspective. Here, the past and
future that are the beginning and ending of the novel, both adrift on a ship in
a more primitive time than those eras related between them. By completing this
circle of time and events, the “ends” of time disappear into one another, which
drives us to examine the cyclical nature of the realities of the novel.

Continuing forward through the Cloud Atlas timeline, “The
Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” opens with the title character recounting
an attack. Instead of admitting the shameful truth – that three teenage girls
mugged him – he admits to us that he “had already amplified the truth and told
her my muggers were five louts with swastikas shaved onto their skulls”
(Mitchell 145-146). Again, we see human willingness to alter a past event in
order to protect a present or future, or even something so basic as ego or
pride. We see reality yet again as a malleable aspect of human perception.
Cavendish cannot even go back and correct his modification of history: “You
can’t go changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up
even more” (Mitchell 146). Consistency is essential if humanity is to complete
the presentation and acceptance of this altered past. It is important to note
that that even when Cavendish uses an ambiguous phrase like “You probably
spotted it pages ago, dear Reader” (Mitchell 175), it is simply a clue to force
the reader to look back and reconsider what was PERCEIVED to be reality as
opposed to what is ACTUALLY reality. After a night of drinking, Cavendish
describes how “time’s arrow became time’s boomerang” (Mitchell 147), as his
perceptions became unreliable and stretched. Later, after his stroke, Cavendish
considers that time is now “no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina” (Mitchell
354). The image of the concertina opening and closing, stretching and
condensing shows the nature of these “elastic” moments, when perception is
reduced or eliminated, along with the ability to put together what is
perceived. Also, Cavendish finds himself lost between his “real” world and the
“virtual” one presented in “Half-Lives,” as he tries to understand that his
stroke: “A stroke? Two-stroker? Stroke me? Margo Roker had a stroke. Margo
Roker?” (Mitchell 354). Here Cavendish references a character in “Half-Lives.”
However, Margo Roker did not suffer a stroke, but was instead nearly beaten to
death but eventually recovered. This is simply another example of reality
flexing and realigning itself due to outside forces: in this case, Cavendish’s
altered mental state.

We see more on the transitory nature of human perception further
along during Cavendish’s recovery after his stroke. As Cavendish begins to
regain his senses, he realizes that that his memory is irreparably damaged:
“How many days have I lain here? Pass. How old is Tim Cavendish? Fifty?
Seventy? A hundred? How can you forget your age?” (Mitchell 354). This loss
of even the most basic elements of his identity demonstrate the fragility of
perception as it relates to reality. The ongoing struggle for Cavendish to
regain himself is a monumental undertaking:

Putting Timothy Cavendish together again was a Tolstoyan editing job, even for
the man who once condensed the nine-volume Story of Oral Hygiene on the Isle of
Wight to a mere seven hundred pages. Memories refused to fit, or fitted but
came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of
myself remained lost? (Mitchell 354)

Cavendish presents us with a microcosmic example of Mitchell’s idea of
perception and reality. Just as Frobisher expressed his doubts about the
authenticity of Adam Ewing’s journal (Mitchell 64), here Timothy Cavendish shows
us the doubts about himself and his own identity. If he questions what elements
of himself may still be lost, how can we know if the Cavendish represented from
before the stroke is true? Even if the events recalled are true, he cannot be
sure that he reassembled them in either the proper order or under the proper
circumstances as they actually occurred. Clearly, then, the entire Cavendish
section is thrown into doubt, as the narrator himself is compromised by
circumstances that force a massive “editing job” on his own history.

To make matters even more difficult in deciphering the reality of
the novel, Cavendish reveals his discovery that the author of “Half-Lives” is a
man who has no link to the events in the story (Mitchell 387). This revelation
forces a complete re-examination of that portion of the novel. If “Half-Lives”
is indeed a work of fiction, then “Letters from Zedelghem” and “The Pacific
Journal of Adam Ewing” are also fictional, as they exist solely in
“Half-Lives.” The conclusion is that that the birthmark presumably shared by
Frobisher and Luisa Rey is also a piece of fiction. For while Cavendish also
has a birthmark, which he describes as “I, too, have a birthmark, below my left
armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it
Timbo’s Turd” (Mitchell 357), the birthmark is not claimed to be identical to
the others. Cavendish himself dispenses with the idea that his birthmark is in
any way related to Frobisher and Luisa’s. Again, it is for to us to perceive
the connection between these birthmarks, even though Cavendish has just negated
the first two individuals that bear it through the revelation of their fictional
nature. This revelation also forces us to reevaluate the appearance of a
birthmark on Sonmi-451 (Mitchell 198), since the reduction of its relevance
given the revelations of the Cavendish section only serves to validate the idea
that it is the reader that gives it its importance in the first place. We are
then given another red herring designed to lead us into the next section of the
novel when Cavendish comments on his train ride past Cambridge:

Cambridge outskirts are all science parks now. Ursula and I went punting below
that quaint bridge, where those Biotech Space Age cuboids now sit cloning humans
for shady Koreans (Mitchell 168).

Here we see the first reference to a future event in the novel: the clone
occupied Korean society of “An Orison of Sonmi-451.” By cross-referencing the
novels storylines in a way differently from what has gone before, we must shift
our perception yet again in an attempt to make sense of what we are
experiencing.

In “An Orison of Sonmi-451,” Mitchell presents a bleak future in which cloned
workers called fabricants perform various undesirable tasks for humanity while
being kept in a mentally oblivious state designed to keep them from questioning
the system in which they serve. Sonmi-451 is one such clone who attains
consciousness and is turned into a revolutionary by the system in order that an
example can be made of her (Mitchell 347-48). During an interview with an
archivist prior to her execution, Sonmi defines perfectly the relationship
between memory and reality: “Fabricants have no earliest memories, Archivist.
One twenty-four hour cycle in Papa Song’s is indistinguishable from any other”
(Mitchell 185). Because their owners control the clones memories, they rob them
of unique experiences, leaving them with no past and with only hope for a
future. That future is solely dependent on what the masters of their society
grant to them and is based solely the information provided by them. When
pressed by Sonmi about his role in the charade that is her trial, it is the
archivist who ironically makes the most telling declaration yet about the
fluidity of perception and history: “A duplicitous archivist wouldn’t be much
use to future historians” (Mitchell 189). The young archivist never stops to
consider that an archivist could be loyal to something other than the truth of
an event. This is the fallacy of recorded history. Since future history is
dependent solely on what is recorded in the present and on its recorder, how can
we believe anything, much less know it, to be accurate? Sonmi-451 explains the
contradiction that the ruling society finds itself in concerning history:

On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could
access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict,
that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of
Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages (Mitchell
234).

This is a catch-22 by any definition. History must be recorded for future use
by the ruling class, but such recording becomes a record that cannot be changed
when convenient. Or, to phrase the question more succinctly, what should the
ruling class save accurately and what should be discarded or changed during the
recording process? Timothy Cavendish has already told us: “You can’t go
changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up even more”
(Mitchell 146). We must take special care to ensure that which is set down is
as accurate as possible, even if it works to the detriment of the recorder in
the present.

Isaac Sachs again expresses this phenomenon in a clearer and more simplistic
way:

The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to
its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the
right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the
tune.) (Mitchell 392-93).

The winner of any conflict controls History. The entity that controls History
controls reality, as we see in Cavendish’s revelation concerning his own
regained memories. Reality is only as solid as what it is based on. The
foundation of the present is based what has been set down as having gone
before. Later in the same journal, Sachs asks “Is there a meaningful
distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows – the actual past
– from another such simulacrum – the actual future?” (Mitchell 393). Both
Timothy Cavendish and Sonmi-451 have shown us that there is no difference. If a
past is “virtual” but no one knows it to be false, then it is, for all intents
and purposes, the “actual” past. Therefore, the present based on this past is
as genuine as any other.

As Paul de Man postulates in his essay “Autobiography as De-facement,” the idea
of Sonmi-451 dictating her autobiography as a historical record comes with
problems:

By making autobiography into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status
of mere reportage, chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest
one, among the canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres (de Man 919).

What de Man is saying here is that there is no way to separate a supposedly
fact-based narrative from any other aesthetic-dependent literary genre. And,
although Sonmi-451 is dictating rather than committing her story to paper, it
nonetheless leaves itself open to intrusion by modification for purely aesthetic
purposes. Here, again, we see an example of perceptual modification, forcing
the reader to question the events. If history is, indeed, written by the
winner, then the loser’s story must also be taken with some skepticism, as not
only will it be altered by the historian, but by the participant as well.
Additionally, de Man further defines the difference between autobiography and
fiction:

Autobiography seems to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events in a
less ambivalent way than fiction does. It seems to belong to a simpler mode of
referentiality, of representation, and of diegesis. It may contain lots of
phantasms and dreams, but these deviations from reality remain rooted in a
single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontested readability of his
proper name (de Man 920).

The idea that the major difference between a work of fiction and an
autobiography is the more limited narrative style in an autobiography is
disturbing, especially considering de Man’s assertion that simpler meanings are
assigned or assumed to the text. Or, as he put it: “It appears, then, that the
distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but
that it is undecidable” (de Man 921). Further, he poses the following question:

“but is it possible to remain, [ . . .] within an undecidable situation?
As anyone who has even been caught in a revolving door or on a revolving wheel
can testify, it is certainly most uncomfortable, and all the more so in this
case since this whirligig is capable of infinite acceleration and is, in fact,
not successive, but simultaneous” ( de Man 921)

This “whirligig” of reality and uncertainty is at the heart of Cloud Atlas.
The longer we read and attempt to determine what is real and what is not, we
accelerate ever faster around the idea that, as de Man says, we are
simultaneously in both a real and an unreal environment. We cannot know with
certainty that any of the events are real at any given time, and thus, like
Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously both alive and dead inside its sealed box, the
events contained within the cover of Cloud Atlas are at once real and
unreal—true and untrue—even to each other.

By the time we reach “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After,” we
have reached the absolute end of the timeline Mitchell has constructed for us:
not in Zachry’s tale, but in his son’s recounting of it. He reveals the
question that Mitchell is asking: what can we believe and what can we discard?
“Do I b’lief his yarn ‘bout the Kona an’ his fleein’ from Big I? Most yarnin’s
got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’
true. The stuff ‘bout Meronym the Prescient was mostly true, I reck’n”
(Mitchell 309). But even here, at the end, there is doubt, and that is what
remains. We have already placed doubt on Meronym’s birthmark, as it falls into
the same category of unlikelihood of the other birthmarks.

Again, according to Sachs:

Symmetry demands an actual + virtual
future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up – a
virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual
future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophesy, but
the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses
today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy
distance, where they are no good to anyone. (Mitchell 393)

Cloud Atlas presents us with a complete
spectrum of possibilities as to what is the actual past and what is the virtual
past. The actual past that is Adam Ewing’s journal, read later by Robert
Frobisher and relayed to Rufus Sixsmith and then to Luisa Rey. Only in Timothy
Cavendish’s story do we learn that this virtual past is merely the creation of
Hilary V. Hush (Mitchell 387), and is a complete fabrication. There remains no
choice but to realign our suppositions concerning reality. Further muddying the
water, Mitchell references forward in time through by Cavendish’s “prophesy” of
Korean clones (Mitchell 168). While the existence of the “Biotech cuboids” is
an indicator of the “virtual” future, the “actual” future that follows does, as
Sachs suggests, eclipse the virtual one, as no one could have foreseen the
outcome of the creation of cloned humans. The Utopia that all societies hope to
achieve exists only as an idea, living among the virtual past and future, but
becoming lost among the actual.

Clearly, then, what we see in Cloud Atlas is an interrogation
of the accuracy of reality, specifically due to man’s tendency, consciously or
unconsciously, to mold it to conform to his current needs or expectations. As a
result, no version of reality is able to function as anything but a story which
may or may not be accurate to any significant degree. This inherent limitation
in any recorded event renders it almost completely useless. How can we know
what has gone before us, or even after us? Mitchell asks that question and
gives us the answer: we cannot. The question we must ask ourselves is the one
Isaac Sachs asks: “Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum
of smoke, mirrors + shadows – the actual past – from another such simulacrum –
the actual future?” (Mitchell 393). Or put more simply: “does it matter?”
That answer can only be: no, for regardless of the reality in which we find
ourselves, virtual or actual, it is the reality in which we find
ourselves, and is thus the reality in which we must live. Fenced in by
perception’s assumptions and assertions, we can only act on what we believe we
know. All other action is irrelevant.